This is What’s Happening

‘A seeping phantasmagoria of contemporary Australiana', This is What's Happening explores the interstice of dance and theatre, seamlessly blending the two forms to create a layer-cake of imagery and evocation, by one of the most exciting new companies in Australian dance. Veering between the tender, the tragic, the irreverent and the downright nonsensical, this kaleidoscopic survey offers audiences a multi-faceted take on how the human condition is holding up in our strange, highly-mediated contemporary lives.

This is What's Happening could be a banal filler statement from a Team Leader talking too much at a Team Meeting, or it could be the solemn, sharp-eyed certainty of a climate scientist’s findings.  This quality of multiplicity and instability is a good fit for performance and choreography in particular, and it is closer to what being alive right now feels like to us, more than any prevailing system of beliefs or practices. We worked for quite some time on this show, and the process has been a necessarily patient one of following the work as it presents itself to us – in increments, usually, and frequently with whole chunks slipping away after first seeming so concrete. It’s a work that we have had to meet on its own terms. 

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'Detail detail detail. It’s the detail which fascinates.'

- Andrew Furhmann

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'Humour, good, black, abstracted and just how I like it...'

- Gracia Haby for Fjord Review

CREATIVE TEAM
Choreographers and performers: Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden, William McBride
Sound designer: Emah Fox
Lighting designer: Jason Crick
Costumes constructed by: Margaret O’Donohue

DOCUMENTATION
Video: NON studio
Photography: Greta Costello

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

Presented by Darebin Arts Speakeasy for Melbourne Fringe 2015

Winner of Melbourne Fringe Award for Best Dance
Nominated for an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance
Nominated for a Green Room Award for Sound Design and Composition